Losing it on their own: Diane Carbonell

In her heart, Diane Carbonell knew she was committed to losing weight once and for all. Her loved ones were understandably skeptical.

For 10 years, they'd watched Diane try diet after diet after diet -- "I did Weight Watchers, I did the Richard Simmons diet...if there was a diet in a magazine, I was game," she says -- and still, here she was, tipping the scale at 305 pounds.

Then came the day Diane turned down a piece of pie at a social gathering.

"My husband says that's when he realized I was really serious," says Diane, a mother of seven who lives in Jackson, Tenn., between Memphis and Nashville. "A friend of mine offered me some pie, and I was always one to take pie. But I said, 'No, thank you,' and she kind of tried to push. You know how people will push. And I just kept refusing politely, and my husband said that's when he knew something had changed.

"...He always laughs about this, because he says it was like I was one Diane one minute, and then it was like a 180."

This Diane, the one we're talking about today, has lost 158 pounds and kept it off for 14 years. Her first 150 pounds came off in 14 months.

Let that sink in a minute.

Now consider this: She accomplished this without counting calories, starving herself, taking strange supplements, working out for eight hours a day or devoting herself to any gimmicky infomercial quick-fix programs.

She ate real food in reasonable portions. She ate fat -- good fat. She walked.

That's it.

"I remember thinking, 'I don't want to diet and make it look like this diet period of my life, and then I have to figure out what to do with the rest of my life,' so I really wanted to do something that was really a lifestyle change," says Diane, who has written a book, "150 Pounds Gone Forever," and created a website (www.fittothefinish.com) to help others in their weight loss journeys.

"My goal was just to do something that would radically shift my relationship with food and my exercise level and the choices I was making," she says. "Something I could sustain."

Diane certainly didn't lack the motivation to make a permanent change.

She had bottled up so much frustration and humiliation and worry over the years -- from not being able to buckle her seatbelt, to breaking a chair at a birthday party, to feeling stared at and judged as she waddled around the grocery store, to standing on the scale at the doctor's office and wondering what would happen to her kids if her weight continued to climb -- that she truly drove herself to a breaking point.

Diane was 31 when, to her chagrin, she was called upon to serve as chaperone for her 7-year-old daughter's class field trip. Because of her weight, Diane says, "I usually tried to avoid that kind of thing."

It didn't take long for Diane to remember why she avoided it. Simply walking the trail at the outdoor museum left her exhausted, out of breath -- and fed up.

To say that Diane added determination to all her motivation would be an understatement.

"I was really committed," she says. "I flicked the switch."

The biggest key to Diane's success? Conquering the cause of her obesity: emotional eating.

In the past, whenever she was feeling stressed out or bored or embarrassed or sad, she says "I would rush right to the pantry and start to eat M&Ms or something. It was like I was turning to the one thing that was making me miserable."

Diane used a journal to combat her issues with food. If she'd just had a stressful phone call and wanted to eat, she wrote it down. If she couldn't find a way to occupy herself while her kids were napping and wanted to eat, she wrote it down.

First, she learned to identify her emotions. Then, she came up with a coping strategy.

"My biggest tip is, when you know what those emotions are, and you start to feel them, is to make yourself wait 15 minutes before you go to the pantry or the refrigerator or the vending machine at work," Diane says. "Those 15 minutes can give you a chance to decompress and really think, am I hungry for food? Like, am I really physically hungry and really do need something to eat, or am I trying to feed an emotion, and I think 98 percent of the time for me and for other people I've talked to, it's genuinely an emotion you're trying to feed, and just understanding that is huge.

"I still feel all those emotions, and I still have all those types of feelings. None of that has changed. But how I react to them has changed, and a lot of that is because I've learned to wait, and say, 'O.K., I'm just heading for the nut jar because...' "

Exercise-wise, Diane says that while she tries to run a few 5K races every year, the vast majority of her activity comes from walking. Her daily 45-minute speed walks have made her a fixture in her neighborhood.

"People say you can't lose weight from walking," she says. "I tell them I lost 150 pounds walking. So, you absolutely can, and it's the easiest exercise you can do."

Not so easy? Long-term weight maintenance. Although Diane says she doesn't think about her weight as often as she used to, and she does allow herself to indulge in treats occasionally, she says staying slim "really does take constant diligence."

"You really have to be diligent about keeping those habits that got you to the weight loss in the first place," she says. "If you don't, that's where the re-gain is going to start. You start slipping, and then you think, 'Well, five pounds doesn't matter,' and then it becomes seven, then 20, and you have a whole different ballgame."

That's why Diane says it's so important to adopt a weight loss plan you can live with the rest of your life.

"I think my main message is that weight loss is attainable without a lot of gimmicks, because it is," Diane says. "So many times, you meet people who...want the next easy fix, but the thing I always tell them is, 'There doesn't have to be an easy fix, because this is actually the easiest way to lose weight, and that is just to start eating that food that's already available to you and using your feet to walk or to swim or whatever it is.'

"It's just not as complicated as we try to make it out to be."

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